With his new CD,
Tactiles (Pi), Liberty Ellman emerges as one of the most intriguing,
albeit unorthodox, guitarists on the New York scene today. An album of
original, esoteric compositions marked by dense polyrhythms, dissonant,
angular lines and an organic logic that ties the whole thing together
in brilliant fashion, Tactiles is a bold and compelling follow-up to
Ellman's ambitious first outing, 1998's Orthodoxy (released on his own
Red Giant label). With these two upstart offerings, along with his
sideman work with such innovators as Greg Osby, Henry Threadgill and
Butch Morris, Ellman has arrived at a place on the guitar that
sidesteps six-string cliches.

"I always avoided spending too much time trying to sound like someone
else," says the guitarist, who was born in London in 1971. "For me,
it's been a process of going after what I think is successful about
music, in general, that I respond to, and using those qualities to
influence my own music and my own playing. For instance, I really like
the way that rhythms can become a melodic element. I'm also attracted
to music that has a really high emotional content. The way Threadgill
puts it is it has to have ecstasy in it. It doesn't have to feel that
way all the time but if it doesn't get to that point you never really
can get fully captivated by it."

Another of Ellman's major compositional influences is Steve Coleman,
whose adventurous rhythmic experiments in the M-Base collective swayed
a generation of aspiring players during the late '80s and early '90s.
"A bass player friend of mine turned me on to Steve's Black Science
CD," Ellman says, "and I was really heavily drawn in because to me it
was super-funky and it had all the elements that I really enjoyed in
improvisation and jazz music. The harmonies were complicated but the
rhythms were very seductive. And I was excited by the way that he was
able to make the music feel modern and contemporary but have all of the
best qualities of real jazz music, so it didn't sound like fusion to me
as much as it did sound like a progression of the music. And I remember
thinking, 'Here is the direction that music is going, as far as modern
improvised creative music is concerned. It didn't stop after free
jazz."'

Ellman's investigation of Coleman's music soon led to other examples of
extended improvisation over groove with odd time signatures, like Greg
Osby's music, the Strata Institute's Cipher Syntax and Dave Holland's
Extensions. "And to me it all just seemed like a natural fit," Ellman
says. "So I began transcribing solos off of these records, learning how
Steve and Greg and [guitarist] Dave Gilmore dealt with that music and
figuring out what it was about, how those guys played that was
different from what I had been learning off of the Pat Martino and Joe
Pass records I had been checking out."

While the angular, odd-metered single-note figures of Ellman pieces
from Tactiles, such as "Excavation" and "Helios," reveal an obvious
M-Base influence, the guitarist's dramatic use of space and haunting
Iyricism on chordal ballads like "Temporary Aid" and "Rare Birds"
suggest a Monkish influence. As Ellman explains, "It's probably
somewhere between the way Monk plays chords and the way Andrew Hill
kind of feels his way around chords, moving from one voicing to another
with loose phrasing that expands and contracts the time. It's really
fun to do, and when you have players who are comfortable with that it's
really exciting because the time then becomes so elastic."

Ellman's playing combines the fleet-fingered, precisely picked approach
of Pat Martino with more subversive forays into jangly dissonance that
suggest James "Blood" Ulmer. His darkly hued tone is warm and alluring,
his chordal approach while accompanying other soloists is shimmering
and pianistic while his own linear tact is spiky, undulating and always
unpredictable.

Meanwhile, the guitarist acknowledges that he has made an incremental
leap in the five years between Orthodoxy and Tactiles. "There's a lot
of change in the way that I play and the way that I can get a handle on
the music, the way I can actually harness what it is in my head," he
says. "I think I'm getting more efficient in translating those ideas
now. So I have a lot of work to do for the next one."
BILL MILKOWSKI